Darkly Dreaming Bedlam
by Rabid Angel
Summary: Tag to 4x11, oneshot. The scariest part of hell was forgetting who he was, and every day, he was losing a little part of himself. He slipped into the skin of the exact person he didn't want to be, the person he despised, and it horrified him.


**Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own the Winchesters. They just take up residence on my Christmas list every year.**

**A/N: I've never written SPN fanfiction before, so this is a foray into something new for me. I've watched the show since day one and been fascinated by the characters, but it was the ending scene in Heaven and Hell when Dean made some confessions about hell that really inspired me to write. I'm constantly writing fiction and have been for years (I've also tried my hand at LOTR fanfiction), so I'm not new to writing, but I hope this first attempt at writing for SPN turns out well. I love me some hurt/sick Dean, so I can promise to write one of those in the future. If you have any comments on this, I'd greatly appreciate hearing them- I want to know how I can improve before continuing in this fandom.**

**Darkly Dreaming Bedlam**

**By: Rabid Angel**

There was no beginning.

There was no journey into the underworld, no titular, epic expedition down the river Styx and into the unknown expanses of fire and brimstone beyond it. There was no freshman-in-frat-house, single-file-line initiation into the ranks of Hades, no courteous welcome to hell from Lucifer himself, nor any sort of greeting whatsoever. There was no established start, no perceptible commencement, no marked inauguration of his descent in any form or fashion recognizable even to the damned. There was merely an afterlife without beginning, but in the most gut-wrenching and dreadful revelation of all cruel, underhanded realizations fathomable, there was merely an afterlife without end.

The last thing he recalled before he came to awareness in the pit was spilling his lifeblood, viscid and scarlet and shockingly real, across the parquet floor and papered walls of the study in a foreign house, the owners of which he didn't even know. It wasn't so much the harbinger of death as it was the herald of defeat, of loss, of _failure. _

There was no beginning in hell, but merely a jarring, clamorous, abrupt jettison into perception. One second he was floating in relative thoughtless anonymity, and the next he was violently hurled into a broken, mutilated body, drawn and quartered over an endless abyss of blood and fire and _suffering. _His first conscious brain wave in hell was not preceded by the slow, fluid rise to awareness that lazy Saturday mornings leave to be desired, but merely by a split-second harsh, dissonant thrust into a failing, tortured body and raucously violent pandemonium that was perception. It wasn't a beginning, it was an awakening, and it was horrendously, desolately, painfully _alone_.

Hell was anarchist chaos, hell was darkly dreaming bedlam, hell was eternal, blood-soaked turmoil. It was dark as the darkest night yet streaked with sudden, fragmented shafts of radioactive red light that cast a sickly, grotesque pallor upon fresh crimson blood and rotting, torn skin cleaved from white bone. There was no end in sight, merely mile after mile of harsh, smoldering terrain peaked at a bloody horizon offering nothing save another farthing of agony and penitence and punishment. The sky was consistently dark, shrouded by foreboding mists and broken only by sporadic flashes of deafening, unexpected lightning that jarred him to the very bone.

He never thought about breathing until he couldn't, choked alternately by sadistic, calloused hands and the thick, concentrated atmosphere of sulfur and smoke. Flame and brimstone were consistent fixtures to this wicked, brutal life after death, rampant fire licking hungrily at spindly skeletons of trees that never quite seemed to burn to the ground. Infernos were everywhere- blazing on the horizon as far as the naked eye could track, smoldering at throngs of preexisting, charred prairie grass, burning at his feet with all of the ardent, zealous perseverance of the castigation and retribution that he hadn't earned, that he didn't deserve, that he had bought and sold.

Hell was unbearably loud, hell was insufferably raucous, hell was perpetual, deafening cacophony. The crackling of the incessant flames consumed his auditory perception and the agonized, tormented screams of each and every one of the damned tore through him like a well-placed knife to the heart. There was no escape from the misery, from the suffering, for when he closed his eyes and wished with all his lingering might and strength to be somewhere else, to be _someone _else, the riotous decibel level increased tenfold. The tortured shrieks and desolate yells of the damned fused with his own frantic, wretched cries of "stop" and "help" and "please" and "_Sam_."

They slowly, _painfully_ sliced and carved and ripped him apart and tore at him until there was nothing left to pare. At the end of the day, he was reduced to a myriad of broken bones and shredded, bloodied flesh so utterly decimated that he appeared to be nothing more than hamburger meat. They tortured him in ways that the human mind couldn't imagine, couldn't even begin to wrap around or fathom. They flayed roughened skin from poorly knitted bone in increments carefully sized for the most agonized, deafening scream and the maximum amount of torture. They violated the intimate, private memories kept concealed in the cobwebs of his mind as a refuge and used them against him by painting vivid portraits of his father suffering in hell just as he was, of Sam reckless and anguished and alone on the surface, representations stunning and realistic and painted with a brush dipped in blood.

And then, ever so abruptly, he would be whole again. Just so they could start all over. Unblemished and healed, intact and in prime condition for the taking. They would approach him with lethal, measured steps as they always did, his hands struggling wildly at the bloodied, millennia-old chains just as they always had, and they would raise the beveled whip, sticky with congealed blood and rotten flesh, and lay into him with unrelenting precision and evident enjoyment just as they always did.

Hell was eternal, hell was perpetual, hell was time. It was day after day of bleeding and screaming until he had nothing left to give, it was weeks of being slowly and agonizingly tortured until each and every one of his darkest secrets and deepest insecurities was extricated, it was years and years of measuring time by what they had taken from him. It was so unspeakably horrendous, so utterly appalling that he couldn't forget how long he'd been there no matter how valiantly he endeavored. Time was not fluid, but rather fragmented and staccato and distinct, defined by how much blood he had liberally shed and how much hurt he had gallantly endured and what few things he had left.

He had Sam. Sam was black and white in a world of gray, all hard, sharp edges of certainty. He was steady, he was conviction, he was faith. He was relief not just in the bleak, desolate moments when the anguish was unbearable and his psyche was straining at the seams of a broken body he couldn't escape, but in every second of every day. He was belief, he was hope, and come hell or high water, he was coming. Sam would save him.

He never blamed Sam. Not even in the darkest, most self-doubting and disheartening moments of his time spent in hell did he ever attribute the fact that he was there to Sam. His unfaltering trust in Sam was resolute, his faith true and implicit. He never blamed Sam for what happened on the surface, because time simply slipped through the hourglass and ran out before they could turn it over fast enough.

Hell was many unspeakable things, but not surprisingly, it wasn't a social playground. He did not make friends, he did not plan a Spartacus-esque uprising, for he was not the only one too locked up in his own pain and suffering to reach out even for the briefest of seconds. However, there was someone (or rather, something, for this being was not at all human) that took an interest in him.

His name was Alistair, spoken only in hushed tones of reservation among those who rained blow after blow upon what little was left of him. It started when he was at his most vulnerable, defenseless and exposed at the end of the day when his body was almost too shattered to hold him up for yet another minute and his entrails were gutted, slippery and pink and gaping from a devastated abdomen that not even the most skilled of surgeons could put back together. Alistair approached him with eyes that blazed brighter than the fire at his feet, eyes that pierced his very psyche and naggingly pulled at his secrets, at what he had left, at Sam. He was relatively human and yet somehow not corporeal, his skin the intense, burned red of terra cotta and his hair the thick darkness of soot.

A trident wielded by malicious hands that had caused so much agony in their time painted three identical welts down his bicep, hot breath and a forked tongue dangerously close to his ear. "I can spare you from this, Dean," he whispered tantalizingly, voice sonorous and resonant and laden with incredible gravity. "You've been punished enough. Now, it's time for you to start putting souls on the rack."

The offer of an afterlife without pain was alluring, the prospect of an end to the perpetual affliction and misery was incredibly tempting, but the consequence revolted him. He couldn't do this to someone, he couldn't. He was never responsible for the lives he couldn't save, but he wouldn't be responsible for the pain he would cause, for the ones he would take. He had hardly any saliva to wet his raw throat and his voice was hoarse from years of desperate screaming, but it was enough to hiss, "never."

Alistair did not look at all surprised by his resistance, but merely jammed the points of the trident further into his aching, abused flesh. The pain was miniscule, swimming in a sea of innumerable agonies that took precedence. "No more pain, Dean. No more suffering." His voice was a seductive, rich purr, and oh, how he wished for this cycle of hurt and agony and atonement to end, how he wished for Sam to come for him, but respite from every pain imaginable wasn't worth unjustly inflicting it upon someone else.

He spat in Alistair's face. "I said never."

For thirty years, Alistair returned at the end of every day. The routine never changed. When he was at his most vulnerable, when he was too weak to lift his head, when he was battered and bruised and bleeding and achingly tired of this life, Alistair would come. And for thirty years, he said no.

But there was something building inside of him, some dangerous emotion that he couldn't shake, a troublesome self-doubt that undermined all of his confidence, all of his resolve, all of his conviction. It was a maddening sentiment that slowly grated at the absolute faith he had rooted in the unquestionable fact that Sam would come for him, that he could endure, that someday, Sam would come. It usurped his tolerance for the perpetual agony, commandeered every increment of assurance that kept him going, and it tore relentlessly away at his foundation and infrastructure until finally, he said yes.

He was released from the rack, manacles that had been bloodied by his raw wrists for thirty years at last blissfully unlocked. He was healed and immaculate once more, crafted into the perfect instrument of torture. The tear across his belly so like that across his mother's was replaced by smooth flesh, the expansive black bruises subsided into unbroken porcelain, the irreparably broken bones knitted within strong limbs corded with solid muscle, and the plethora of shallow slices across every inch of him disappeared. He was as supple and flexible as he had been on the surface, every inch as strong and then some. He was whole, he was pristine, he was new, his perfection marred only by the raised, hardened scars left by Alistair's trident after every visit.

He began to join the ranks of hell and torture its inhabitants, becoming familiar with spiked whips, leather lashes, wooden mallets, underhanded mind games, and all other aggressors of pain and suffering. Day after day, he snarled at the damned just as he had once been snarled at, drew blood just as he had once shed it, tore into their minds to pull out their secrets with a metaphorical scythe just as he had once been violated. And every day, he hated himself for being so cruel, but justified it in that he had served his time and that he couldn't tolerate any more anguish, he just _couldn't. _He lost count of how many agonized souls underwent his ministrations, his carefully calculated methods to rip them apart as slowly and torturously as possible.

He found that the scariest part was forgetting who he was. There were times when his awareness slipped, his perception faltered, and he became something else entirely. He forgot all of his ethical convictions, all of his noble principles, all of his life on the surface, and became nothing more than one of Lucifer's innumerable servants. He forgot his identity, and for the briefest of moments, he enjoyed the torture. He slipped into the skin of the exact person he despised, the exact person he didn't want to be, and it horrified him.

He existed solely in fear of such momentary lapses, became as vigilant as possible so as to prevent them, wracked his brain for memories of the surface so as to keep himself good, to keep himself human. But no amount of vigilance and caution could throw a wrench in the perpetual cycle of hell, and every day, he was losing a little part of himself. Was this his atonement? Was this his penitence? Was this Lucifer's idea of a cosmic joke?

When the day ended and he retired to his pallet, it all came rushing back in a sudden, vivid onslaught of memory- why he was there, who he was on the surface. And every time he lay down, he cried himself to sleep wishing that he would remember who he was when the day began and that Sam would come, that Sam would save him.

And then, the cycle broke. He wasn't entirely aware when it happened, suspended between who he should be and who he was becoming, but it was more than enough to pull him from his stupor. Some celestial force latched onto his upper arm, an unprecedented shaft of white light piercing through the endless radioactive dark and an eerie calm settling over the burning terrain. For a moment, the cycle of hell paused, the eternal wheels stopped turning.

He was suddenly and acutely aware, but much to his astonishment, the entity was _good. _It felt almost as though the sun was shining upon him after a long stint in a dark penitentiary, the sensation was so unfamiliar and yet so fondly remembered. The touch seared into his flesh, but was good, it was sanctified, it was divine. The gratitude was enough that he thought he might never ask for anything again, and he couldn't help but think that Sam was here, that Sam had come, that Sam had saved him. An unusual lassitude spread through him, a lethargy the likes of which he had not been able to revel in since his descent, and before he knew what was happening, his feet were off the ground and he was coughing, choking, reanimated and pawing the ceiling of a claustrophobic wooden enclosure.

He's real, he's _human_, he's now the servant of an angel, he's back. As time passes, he has difficulty adapting to the way he had once measured it, firmly rooted in the cycle of hell and its idiosyncrasies. Sam didn't save him and, even though he has Sam back, he isn't Sam. He's harder, faster, less ethical and less emotional, dark and secretive, highly trained and equivalent to a well-oiled machine.

He tells Sam that he doesn't remember what happened in hell, and he knows it's a lie, but it chokes out anyway. He tries not to think about what happened before he was gripped tight and raised from perdition, but hell has become a part of him, always lingering behind the cobwebs close enough to taunt him but far enough out of reach that he can't chase it down and shoot it like so much of his life. It's an aspect of himself that he despises because of the weakness it presents, because of the memories he endeavors to forget, and it's something that he can't share with Sam under any circumstance. Sam wouldn't understand- he can't understand. He remembers everything about it, remembers the torment and suffering of _all _those souls, the torment and suffering that he caused, and it physically hurts, a treacle-thick lump in his throat and a heavy weight in his chest.

At night, he dreams in vivid Technicolor, almost like a psychedelic acid trip. Hell is carved into him like inscriptions on a tombstone, its fires licking at his legs night after night, its inhabitants calling his name, crying for revenge. He dreams of fire and brimstone and radioactive red, and when he wakes up at night, he wakes up with the taste of soot and iron-rich blood on his tongue like rotten fruit, the riotous, deafening screams of agony residually echoing in his ears. He can still feel the whip lashing across his lacerated back, the knives paring his shredded skin. Extraordinary, what the body remembers. He would never have thought that mere flesh and blood could hold so much of hell's ghostly script.

He doesn't tell Sam. He looks across the divide to ensure that his brother still sleeps, pads into the locked bathroom with a pillow, and muffles his desolate, choking sobs into the fabric so that Sam doesn't hear.

He has always been his brother's rock, his vision of certainty, of heroism, and he won't let hell take that from him.

He knows that thirty years of the three lines of Alistair's trident are painted directly beneath the swollen scar left from Castiel's hand, a precarious balance of heaven and hell, of the dueling good and bad that rage within him. He no longer fears losing his identity, but rather is terrified of the fact that he did not return to the surface exactly as he left it, that someone new and horrendous and terrible is building beneath his skin. He knows that hell has left its mark on him, that he wasn't finished serving his eternal term, that Lucifer doesn't let his subjects escape and is scheming to pull him back into the chaotic depths, that his soul is straddling the fine line between good and evil and doesn't know which way to lean. His goodness is not innate, the fires of hell blur his perception, and it's getting harder and harder to do the right thing.

He's not merely afraid, he's terrified. He's terrified of what he might do, of what might come, of the fact that hell's mark within him will someday resurface. There's something wicked this way coming, something evil and sinister and malevolent brewing to take the earth by storm, and he's already got it inside of him.

All he has to do is give in.

**-FINIS-**

**Reviews are greatly appreciated- thanks for reading :)! **


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